CHRIS ANDERSON from THE LONG TAIL is one of my favorite authors from last year. His next book, FREE is due out in mid-2008  and SURE to be a  HUGE  HIT! He will explore the FREE-CONOMICS syndrome. Some of the chapters he is playing with include:

         1)   FREE: The story of a radical price (zero)

         2)   FREE: How $0.00 changed the world

          3)    FREE: How companies get rich by charging nothing

           4)   FREE: The economics of abundance and the marketplace without money

5) FREE: The past and future of a radical price.

Chris also participated in another new book, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers

In a very smart FREE  marketing move, Wiley, the publisher, has offered each of the subjects the opportunity to give away the chapter they're in as a free pdf on their site. (Get Chris Andersons chapter at his site).

Finally, Wiley is giving away the book in small chunks, harnessing the combined distribution (and ego) of the prominent bloggers that are featured in the book. Each of us promotes the book to promote ourselves, and the book gets the collective blog buzz. Others who have done what I'm doing in promoting their own chapter include Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing, David Rothman at TeleBlog and Steve Garfield.

It will be interesting to see how well this works. Will these samples encourage people to buy the book to get all the chapters, neatly wrapped in a convenient package? Or is something as fragmented and bitty as 30 short interviews so easy to consume in small chunks that the free samples satisfy most of the demand, rather than stimulate it? Because the chapters are all on different blogs it's hard to read them all together, so this isn't the same as simply giving the whole book away in one download. But as an experiment in leveraging the power of free samples to sell books, it will be worth watching all the same."